Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Human Rights Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

International Law

Selected Works

Selected Works

2016

Violence

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Human Rights Law

Surprised By Sin: Human Rights And Universality, Tawia Baidoe Ansah Feb 2016

Surprised By Sin: Human Rights And Universality, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Tawia B. Ansah

International human rights law's claim to universality, at the level of normative formation, has been shaped by conceptions of the self over time. The metaphysical reconfigurations of the self, from the Enlightenment to the present, have marked the human rights narrative in particular ways. This essay will suggest that since World War II, a conception of the self within a narrative of rights has been replaced, or at least countermanded, by a conception of sacral evil, with profound implications for the normative claim to universality of the human rights discourse. The essay begins with a synoptic analysis of the rise …


Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah Feb 2016

Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Tawia B. Ansah

Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, the government issued broad new laws outlawing the use of ethnic categories, with a view to uniting all Rwandans under a single Rwandan identity. This self-erasure of ethnic identity is deployed primarily within the borders of the state, to enable reconciliation after the genocide in 1994. Outside the borders, the state deploys ethnic identity as one of the rationales for its cross-border wars (in the Democratic Republic of Congo).